[Player Issues! Some thoughts.]
Okay, first off. I don't have all the answers. I'm not saying I do. Nor am I saying that the problems people are having as players are minor or should be dismissed. When you care about a game as much as we care about CFUD, you do worry about these things. And if camp wasn't so awesome, we wouldn't care half as much as we do! It's a catch-22, only one made of awesome and crack instead of suck.
However, I think we do have common issues, particularly in how we deal with how OOC limitations effect our IC play. I want to share how I've dealt with them in the past to get to the point I'm at now, and how that works for me. I'm not endorsing this wholesale, but I hope that some of this might be useful to other people.
I first apped in July 2005. What with the joint app and all, I didn't really come into my own as a player until September. Kon was having a great time in camp. I made a lot of mistakes, but I had a lot of fun too. I played up the superhero and the flirty side of things, and Kon really enjoyed the recognition he got as one of the big fish in the small pond that was camp. He knew most of the people in camp, and by December I could say that I had threaded with every player in camp at least once. I really liked this -- Kon is a social type, and this was both IC and good for his ego. As a player, I felt happy too -- although shy in person, I liked being able to talk to a lot of muns. I found IRC overwhelming (still do) but logging in and getting greeted with a barrage of pings was a big happiness boost. And the people I met were cool, fun to bounce ideas around with.
However, camp got larger really quickly. At the same time, I got busier at school as well. I'd always felt really bad about threading while at work, but it was the only time I could catch most of the US/Canada players. Then bad-stuff started happening in camp that Kon should have been involved with heroically, but couldn't be because of my OOC time commitments. I played Kon as feeling bad about this, like it was a reflection of his abilities as a hero, cast around for other heroic things for him to do to allow him to be useful and to boost his ego. However, these seemed only to be temporary fixes, and the issue kept cropping up again and again, especially as more powerful campers got apped, and these campers either just ignored Kon totally or took on the role Kon had played during his early time at camp.
In a concrit post, another character got crit because their character didn't have the influence in camp they did in canon. Although the crit wasn't addressed to me, it struck a chord. I thought about it for a while and realised that camp wasn't canon -- there were too many variables. Furthermore, while in the early days of camp it was easier for Kon to have an influence and a definite place, with the current size and growth of camp, and the limits of my playing capacity, it just wasn't possible for me to recreate that early heroic vibe. Kon no longer knew most of camp and there were new muns with multiple characters and canons I'd never encountered before.
So, basically, I realised I had a choice between making myself and Kon miserable trying to live up to expectations I'd placed on myself that were totally unrealistic, or I could accept the current situation, resolve not to let my OOC limitations effect Kon, and move on.
I chose the latter. I decided that Kon does a lot of heroic stuff off-screen, and let him alude to his daily bout of zombie thrashing, etc./flying over camp patrols when it comes up, and if there's a boss battle and I am free, I throw him in. I love boss fights! I hate to miss them. But I no longer beat myself up when I do miss them, and neither does Kon.
I also had to accept that because of this choice, other characters will not respect Kon as he thinks he should be respected, nor will they appreciate him as I want him to be appreciated. This was harder than you might think! But someone somewhere said that you can never change other people -- you can only change yourself. A lot of becoming comfortable as a player was the realisation that although I might want people to adore Kon as much as I do, I have utterly no control over this. It's sad, but I was feeling jealous of the really crack characters who seemed to get a lot of attention, and be quoted on cfud_quote a lot. Since no one told me 'hey, that thread with Kon was funny' or 'hey, I really liked threading with you' I convinced myself no one cared. The first time Simon did a love-meme and people said how much they liked Kon -- I cried. I'd had no idea. I think we've got a lot better collectively at telling people we enjoy their threads with the concrit comm, and the love-memes, but sometimes you do feel as though you are playing in a void. When this happens, I think you've got to ask yourself whether you're playing the character for you or for other people? And then go and do something with the character that you enjoy. If you're having fun, then other people are as well.
About the time I'd come to feel comfortable with this, I moved back to New Zealand to a different timezone and an absolutely shitty connection. It was awful. I would be forced to drop threads with little or no warning, lost track of people my characters had been close friends with and was feeling directionless irl to boot.
The not being able to be accountable for dropping/continuing threads especially made me really emo. I'm a person who values courtesy and mutual respect highly in real life and online, so by disappearing and threading sporadically, I felt like I was being extremely rude. I was constantly reminding people about my poor net circumstances, the lag, and making excuses and then worrying that people would think I was making excuses to avoid them. This feeling of paranoia was heightened when I discovered that I'd missed comments which happened frequently as my net cut out without warning. I came really close to leaving the game a few times, because I just couldn't face the angst I was creating for myself. But the friends I'd made here were too important, and on the rare occasions when my net worked, I had fun! I even had two big events, the Potamos hate-spell plot and the Wedding, which got a big attendance and made me feel better generally.
So over time, just through sheer necessity, I adjusted. I tried to let as many people as I could know about my crappy net, and then said 'This is out of my hands. I'm going to let go of it now.' It took some amount of internal struggling to do this, but as my OOC stress about things entirely beyond my control was impacting my enjoyment of the game, it had to go. I still felt bad about it, but instead of sitting there trying to reconnect like an obsessive geek, I went and made a sandwich or played with the dog instead. I was much happier as a person, and I think my threads improved too.
Then I got into Honours! Which meant moving house, a new city and a hell of a lot of course work. I've also discovered that the reason for my mood swings and horrible period pain is a legitimate health problem, which I'm not going to go into here, but this could have been a horribly stressful year for me campwise -- and it wasn't. I've had to take several hiatuses to deal with course work, have been afraid to do a comment count because I don't want to see how much my spam-fu has fallen, had a lot of close friends leave the game and yet, I'm still here, still enjoying it, and have become very .... zen about it all. Which is my motto here. I do my best to keep the mods and the people I thread with the most informed of what is happening in my personal life, and then do my best not to stress about it. I've also accepted that there will be a disjunct between what I want to have happen in camp and what I can humanly accomplish.
On that note, I had another realisation about my characters relationships. Everything I've said about realising how my play was limited by OOC circumstance effected other people's play as well. I'm sorry, but I am that dense that this came as a revelation of its own. Basically, I had the same problem with three different people before I realised the problem wasn't them not playing with me enough -- it was how I viewed our interaction. Now, my default assumption tended to be that in game interaction = the total interaction. So frequent and long threads = strong relationship. This is true in the case of Buffy, who for some reason I just click with and we can spam in any given situation. But in the case of Kon's other big relationships, he didn't thread long enough/frequently enough/in enough depth. Therefore I concluded (and let Kon conclude) that these relationships were in trouble.
Not so! One of these players has a totally different style than I do -- she prefers short threads and since her time is limited, assumes that these threads are representative of more threads that happen off-screen and don't necessarily get played out. This approach actually makes a lot of sense to me, and I am kicking myself that I didn't get in contact with her OOCly sooner to clear this up. I've adopted her approach to viewing interactions and no longer assume that because there is no spamming, there is no relationship.
The other two were facing severe time constraints and pressures of their own as I found out when I talked to them about the 'problem'. They were willing enough and wanting to thread more but irl issues just meant that it was something we had to work at rather than take for granted. Once I realised the constraints on them more, I felt like I had no right to put more pressure on them. After all, should their enjoyment of the game suffer and their characters be put under pressure because they weren't meeting my expectations? I accepted that this was a circumstance over which I had no control. What I could control, however, was my reaction to it.
The relationship thing was a problem because I considered it one. If I stopped thinking of it as a problem, not only did it stop being a problem, but without that pressure there, I had more fun with the threads that we did have! I think telling people you want to thread with them is always going to be a good idea, and I'm all for ooc coordination and planning. But I think that the most important consideration in all of this is that everyone is relaxed and having fun.
The other important thing is being comfortable with yourself and your limitations. IRC overwhelms me still, and since I gave it up to focus more on study, I've discovered that I'm much more comfortable with e-mail and gchat as means to contact people. I've also discovered that people are very approachable over e-mail, and I'm really enjoying the new contacts I've made. A lot of people are shy and find e-mail intimidating and I do too sometimes (especially when people's e-mail addresses aren't easy to find on their character's profile. :p Note to self: Doublecheck everyone e-mail address is clearly visible.) but I can honestly say that I've not had one sharp or angry response to an e-mail that I've sent people.
The same with tagging people in game. It used to be that I thought 'If I don't get tagged, no one wants to play with me.' However, since reading the concrit and emo posts, I have come to the conclusion that everyone in camp is just to shy to tag me. So I try to tag people as the opportunity comes up. If I'm busy with study and trying not to start threads, I'll only tag one or two people. If I have time to spend, I'll tag more -- it's not a reflection on how much I want to play with you, but on how much time I have or my energy levels! And I always want to be tagged -- it's like a huge compliment. Sometimes I feel bad that someone will tag me just as my study break ends and I have to get back to work, or while I'm distracted, but if that happens I try to let them know via e-mail or small font, and people are really lovely and understanding. I promise. So, never ever be afraid to tag -- or to get in contact oocly for clarification on something! Some of the coolest people I've met in this game, I first started talking to by asking 'what does 'xxx' mean?' /o/
Wow, this is almost as long as the first essay I wrote for Honours. Hopefully it's been useful!
However, I think we do have common issues, particularly in how we deal with how OOC limitations effect our IC play. I want to share how I've dealt with them in the past to get to the point I'm at now, and how that works for me. I'm not endorsing this wholesale, but I hope that some of this might be useful to other people.
I first apped in July 2005. What with the joint app and all, I didn't really come into my own as a player until September. Kon was having a great time in camp. I made a lot of mistakes, but I had a lot of fun too. I played up the superhero and the flirty side of things, and Kon really enjoyed the recognition he got as one of the big fish in the small pond that was camp. He knew most of the people in camp, and by December I could say that I had threaded with every player in camp at least once. I really liked this -- Kon is a social type, and this was both IC and good for his ego. As a player, I felt happy too -- although shy in person, I liked being able to talk to a lot of muns. I found IRC overwhelming (still do) but logging in and getting greeted with a barrage of pings was a big happiness boost. And the people I met were cool, fun to bounce ideas around with.
However, camp got larger really quickly. At the same time, I got busier at school as well. I'd always felt really bad about threading while at work, but it was the only time I could catch most of the US/Canada players. Then bad-stuff started happening in camp that Kon should have been involved with heroically, but couldn't be because of my OOC time commitments. I played Kon as feeling bad about this, like it was a reflection of his abilities as a hero, cast around for other heroic things for him to do to allow him to be useful and to boost his ego. However, these seemed only to be temporary fixes, and the issue kept cropping up again and again, especially as more powerful campers got apped, and these campers either just ignored Kon totally or took on the role Kon had played during his early time at camp.
In a concrit post, another character got crit because their character didn't have the influence in camp they did in canon. Although the crit wasn't addressed to me, it struck a chord. I thought about it for a while and realised that camp wasn't canon -- there were too many variables. Furthermore, while in the early days of camp it was easier for Kon to have an influence and a definite place, with the current size and growth of camp, and the limits of my playing capacity, it just wasn't possible for me to recreate that early heroic vibe. Kon no longer knew most of camp and there were new muns with multiple characters and canons I'd never encountered before.
So, basically, I realised I had a choice between making myself and Kon miserable trying to live up to expectations I'd placed on myself that were totally unrealistic, or I could accept the current situation, resolve not to let my OOC limitations effect Kon, and move on.
I chose the latter. I decided that Kon does a lot of heroic stuff off-screen, and let him alude to his daily bout of zombie thrashing, etc./flying over camp patrols when it comes up, and if there's a boss battle and I am free, I throw him in. I love boss fights! I hate to miss them. But I no longer beat myself up when I do miss them, and neither does Kon.
I also had to accept that because of this choice, other characters will not respect Kon as he thinks he should be respected, nor will they appreciate him as I want him to be appreciated. This was harder than you might think! But someone somewhere said that you can never change other people -- you can only change yourself. A lot of becoming comfortable as a player was the realisation that although I might want people to adore Kon as much as I do, I have utterly no control over this. It's sad, but I was feeling jealous of the really crack characters who seemed to get a lot of attention, and be quoted on cfud_quote a lot. Since no one told me 'hey, that thread with Kon was funny' or 'hey, I really liked threading with you' I convinced myself no one cared. The first time Simon did a love-meme and people said how much they liked Kon -- I cried. I'd had no idea. I think we've got a lot better collectively at telling people we enjoy their threads with the concrit comm, and the love-memes, but sometimes you do feel as though you are playing in a void. When this happens, I think you've got to ask yourself whether you're playing the character for you or for other people? And then go and do something with the character that you enjoy. If you're having fun, then other people are as well.
About the time I'd come to feel comfortable with this, I moved back to New Zealand to a different timezone and an absolutely shitty connection. It was awful. I would be forced to drop threads with little or no warning, lost track of people my characters had been close friends with and was feeling directionless irl to boot.
The not being able to be accountable for dropping/continuing threads especially made me really emo. I'm a person who values courtesy and mutual respect highly in real life and online, so by disappearing and threading sporadically, I felt like I was being extremely rude. I was constantly reminding people about my poor net circumstances, the lag, and making excuses and then worrying that people would think I was making excuses to avoid them. This feeling of paranoia was heightened when I discovered that I'd missed comments which happened frequently as my net cut out without warning. I came really close to leaving the game a few times, because I just couldn't face the angst I was creating for myself. But the friends I'd made here were too important, and on the rare occasions when my net worked, I had fun! I even had two big events, the Potamos hate-spell plot and the Wedding, which got a big attendance and made me feel better generally.
So over time, just through sheer necessity, I adjusted. I tried to let as many people as I could know about my crappy net, and then said 'This is out of my hands. I'm going to let go of it now.' It took some amount of internal struggling to do this, but as my OOC stress about things entirely beyond my control was impacting my enjoyment of the game, it had to go. I still felt bad about it, but instead of sitting there trying to reconnect like an obsessive geek, I went and made a sandwich or played with the dog instead. I was much happier as a person, and I think my threads improved too.
Then I got into Honours! Which meant moving house, a new city and a hell of a lot of course work. I've also discovered that the reason for my mood swings and horrible period pain is a legitimate health problem, which I'm not going to go into here, but this could have been a horribly stressful year for me campwise -- and it wasn't. I've had to take several hiatuses to deal with course work, have been afraid to do a comment count because I don't want to see how much my spam-fu has fallen, had a lot of close friends leave the game and yet, I'm still here, still enjoying it, and have become very .... zen about it all. Which is my motto here. I do my best to keep the mods and the people I thread with the most informed of what is happening in my personal life, and then do my best not to stress about it. I've also accepted that there will be a disjunct between what I want to have happen in camp and what I can humanly accomplish.
On that note, I had another realisation about my characters relationships. Everything I've said about realising how my play was limited by OOC circumstance effected other people's play as well. I'm sorry, but I am that dense that this came as a revelation of its own. Basically, I had the same problem with three different people before I realised the problem wasn't them not playing with me enough -- it was how I viewed our interaction. Now, my default assumption tended to be that in game interaction = the total interaction. So frequent and long threads = strong relationship. This is true in the case of Buffy, who for some reason I just click with and we can spam in any given situation. But in the case of Kon's other big relationships, he didn't thread long enough/frequently enough/in enough depth. Therefore I concluded (and let Kon conclude) that these relationships were in trouble.
Not so! One of these players has a totally different style than I do -- she prefers short threads and since her time is limited, assumes that these threads are representative of more threads that happen off-screen and don't necessarily get played out. This approach actually makes a lot of sense to me, and I am kicking myself that I didn't get in contact with her OOCly sooner to clear this up. I've adopted her approach to viewing interactions and no longer assume that because there is no spamming, there is no relationship.
The other two were facing severe time constraints and pressures of their own as I found out when I talked to them about the 'problem'. They were willing enough and wanting to thread more but irl issues just meant that it was something we had to work at rather than take for granted. Once I realised the constraints on them more, I felt like I had no right to put more pressure on them. After all, should their enjoyment of the game suffer and their characters be put under pressure because they weren't meeting my expectations? I accepted that this was a circumstance over which I had no control. What I could control, however, was my reaction to it.
The relationship thing was a problem because I considered it one. If I stopped thinking of it as a problem, not only did it stop being a problem, but without that pressure there, I had more fun with the threads that we did have! I think telling people you want to thread with them is always going to be a good idea, and I'm all for ooc coordination and planning. But I think that the most important consideration in all of this is that everyone is relaxed and having fun.
The other important thing is being comfortable with yourself and your limitations. IRC overwhelms me still, and since I gave it up to focus more on study, I've discovered that I'm much more comfortable with e-mail and gchat as means to contact people. I've also discovered that people are very approachable over e-mail, and I'm really enjoying the new contacts I've made. A lot of people are shy and find e-mail intimidating and I do too sometimes (especially when people's e-mail addresses aren't easy to find on their character's profile. :p Note to self: Doublecheck everyone e-mail address is clearly visible.) but I can honestly say that I've not had one sharp or angry response to an e-mail that I've sent people.
The same with tagging people in game. It used to be that I thought 'If I don't get tagged, no one wants to play with me.' However, since reading the concrit and emo posts, I have come to the conclusion that everyone in camp is just to shy to tag me. So I try to tag people as the opportunity comes up. If I'm busy with study and trying not to start threads, I'll only tag one or two people. If I have time to spend, I'll tag more -- it's not a reflection on how much I want to play with you, but on how much time I have or my energy levels! And I always want to be tagged -- it's like a huge compliment. Sometimes I feel bad that someone will tag me just as my study break ends and I have to get back to work, or while I'm distracted, but if that happens I try to let them know via e-mail or small font, and people are really lovely and understanding. I promise. So, never ever be afraid to tag -- or to get in contact oocly for clarification on something! Some of the coolest people I've met in this game, I first started talking to by asking 'what does 'xxx' mean?' /o/
Wow, this is almost as long as the first essay I wrote for Honours. Hopefully it's been useful!